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404 Errors and Solutions

September 29, 2016

Hi I’m Brent Curry with Tiny Frog Technologies, search marketing specialist. Today I want to talk to you about 404 errors on your site and how to fix them. Basically over the life of the website it’s not uncommon for you to remove pages that are just no longer relevant, maybe products or services or content that doesn’t match up with your business today – it happens. But what problems that it can cause is that sometimes you have external links pointing to those pages and when someone comes to the website from those links they get a 404 error which is basically a broken link. Those external links are actually very valuable from an organic search perspective so we don’t want 404 errors, we want those to be redirected somewhere else.

This is something that we want to pay attention to. You don’t have to look for this on a regular basis but maybe every quarter log into your Google Search Console, go to the crawl menu, select crawl errors, select not found and you’ll get a list of any 404 errors that exists for your website. With this list then you can work with your developer and create 301 redirects, point them to the homepage or maybe other relevant content on the website. Then all that benefit or most of the benefit that you get organically is going to be protected from those external links. So just a little tip, I’m Brent Curry with Tiny Frog Technologies, search marketing specialist. Thank you and please let us know if you have any questions.